E-Mail This Article to a Friend Boys’ clubs Ryan Landry and William Missouri Downs awaken the dead white males BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

Eat your heart out, Harvey Fierstein! Once again, Ryan Landry and his Gold Dust Orphans have set up camp, so to speak, at Machine, where they gasp, quiver, fret, and fly off the handle. Despite — or because of — the show’s scrappy DIY sets and props, lewd sight gags, and epic binges of puns, Landry shows why he’s the best thing to happen to burlesque in Boston since Scollay Square.

Landry found Southern comfort in Tennessee Williams last year when he and his Orphans offered Pussy on the House, a gay spoof of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He continues to bowdlerize and bawdy up Williams’s Pulitzer winners with A "T" Stop Named Denial (through April 23), in which he drags lofty prose down to lurid ground level by lobbing pot shots at everything from Boston politics to Red Sox fans to the play’s overwrought plot. Only problem is that since Streetcar is already so drenched in larger-than-life sentiment, the drag factor thickens the melodrama like cornstarch in gravy instead of giving us something unpredictably vulgar, which is what Landry accomplished in his last endeavor, Who’s Afraid of the Virgin Mary?, the Christmas story warped to fit into the framework of Albee’s contemporary classic.

Denial transplants the DuBois sisters from the steamy environs of New Orleans to the equally steamy, ever more squalid underground confines of an MBTA station through which enormous cardboard Green Line trolleys pass. This is where Stella (doe-eyed baritone Penny Champayne, sporting a bob wig and tacky rayon dresses) and Stanley (Walter Belenky) implausibly reside as a war rages on street level. The kettledrum-chested Landry, looking far from dainty in chunky pearls, ringlets, and pink taffeta get-ups, plays Blanche, who arrives from "Belle Revere" in Southie. As a squatter in the Kowalskis’ digs, Blanche bathes in the T bathroom, tantalizes Stanley, and falls for his pal, Mitch, who sells tokens. Larry Coen, the cast’s sole Equity member, uses frozen wide-eyed expressions and quivering lip to telegraph Mitch’s unruly nerves and insecurities.

Landry’s gay agenda makes for some colorful discussion during the guys’ strip-poker session, and the cross-dressing allows for an amusing mating-dance sequence as Mitch courts Blanche. It also undermines Williams’s portrayal of Stanley’s brutish male bravura.

Belenky is the newest addition to the Gold Dust squad. Although it’s tough to upstage guys in gossamer gowns portraying hormonally off-kilter dames, he proves himself at home among the Orphans, skulking and swaggering and all ready to pounce at the first mention of "Polack." Shirtless and with a leering sneer, he makes a notable effort to simulate Marlon Brando’s predatory lechery, but you can hear tongue lodging itself in cheek when he goes to pummel Stella and she beats him to the punch.

William Missouri Downs could take a lesson from Landry’s wink-wink lampooning. His Dead White Males (at the Theatre Cooperative through April 9) is billed as a "dark comic satire about the underbelly of America’s public schools," but any hoped-for laughs are drowned out by the white noise of an unfocused script. Downs’s story of an idealistic novice teacher, her jaded, cynical colleagues, and a dysfunctional administration at a Kansas middle school chronicles the erosion of newbie Janet’s optimism. The characters are up against almost every headline-worthy matter: keeping religion in or out of the classroom, getting diversity into the curriculum, rampant overmedication of kids, fondling principals, self-interested bureaucrats, substandard test scores, sexual harassment. American schools are in crisis, of course, and any of the above-mentioned would darken Janet’s sunny outlook, but Downs has infected his script with so many social ills that he can’t treat any of them with the attention it deserves. When real tragedy hits, he handles it as if it were a prissy parent.

Director Thomas Martin assembled a talented cast, notably Maureen Adduci as worn-out veteran teacher Doris, but the actors speak as if reading from an instructional manual. "I love teaching," Janet (Susan Gross) keeps chirping. "Distance yourself. It’s the key to teaching," Doris drones. "We teach values by showing values," says the sleazy school-board head. Demise seems inevitable in this caricatured system where truisms are passed off as panaceas. Despite its critical issues, the play is as gripping as a 1950s educational film about smoking.